Category: OS

Lenovo launches their new MediaTek MT8173C ARM dual Cortex-A72 and dual ARM Cortex-A53 with PowerVR GX6250 GPU Powered Chromebook. It's got a 10-point multi-touch 11.6" display and a swivel 360-degree hinge to use as 2-in-1 in four different modes, Laptop, Tablet, Tent, or Stand. With Enhanced Touch Technology that they have implemented in their touchscreen firmware, the 300e Chromebook also allows students to use a standard No.2 pencil on the screen instead of a stylus. it is designed with military-grade durability, with rubber bumpers, reinforced ports, a 360-degree hinge that won’t snap under pressure, the 300e Chromebook is compliant with MIL-STD-810G testing for all manner of shock and awe. It’s also drop-resistant up to 29.5 inches (75cm), the height of a school desk.

French startup Blade presents their awesome Shadow cloud PC service at €30/month that streams a very powerful $2000 (equivalent) desktop PC hosted on their server powered by a high-end 8-threaded Intel Xeon server CPU with an Nvidia GTX1080 GPU, 12GB RAM, 256GB SSD (with harddrive/SSD storage expansion options available) running a full Windows 10 Pro desktop remotely in their server, using low-lag Internet technologies that they have developed, fast codecs (to have at least 15mbit/s Internet bandwidth available is recommended for a good experience), fast tricks that they have developed to make this all possible, to offer cloud gaming or high-end video-editing, 3D graphics rendering, audio processing, or anything else that might be useful to run on advanced PC hardware that you can think of, and you can then run that through client applications either running on their AMD APU based Shadow PC thin client that they offer to their subscribers (for a smooth up to 4K60 or 1080p144hz gaming experience), or you can run clients on a Chromebook, any Android phone, Android TV, Macbooks, any Windows machine, Linux, iPhone, iPad, their service runs on everything. Currently their service works well in France, initially it was just for French users who had Fiber to the home connections, but now it also runs smoothly onto any ADSL, Cable even LTE devices in France, the service is also supported in Belgium and a few other countries nearby France. Because for a good service, the user has to be within as few hops in the global backbone internet network as possible, to experience as little lag times as possible. Advanced professional gamers have tested this system and they have reported that they cannot feel any difference between the Shadow cloud gaming service and a local desktop gaming machine. The lag time are said to depend more on the speed of the PC monitor than of the internet back to their cloud server system. They are about to expand their offering to cover the whole of California as they are setting up a cloud server system right now in the Silicon Valley also. They plan to expand their services globally in the near future according to demand.

I think the most promising Note E-reader form factor, here I compare devices using the same awesome 10.3" flexible (plastics based) E Ink display at 1872x1404 at 226dpi, in thin and light 320-350gr form factors but with different E Ink implementations yet where the Onyx Note seems smoother in the way it manages note taking, page turning, navigating inside of its Android based UI. While the reMarkable seemed to "blink" more in its (Linux?) based UI and with the note taking also seemingly smoother on the Onyx Note at least based on the current firmware that I was able to test and based on how I was able to use the reMarkable. The Onyx Note is shipping shortly at $549 on Amazon (I think they said it's to start shipping between now and February) while the reMarkable is available at $599 on their website once the perfect Android apps for smart collaborative and productive work are available especially for the Onyx Note (I am not sure how the reMarkable manages evt collaboration work and productivity?), I believe this market segment could grow rapidly to be a very important new market segment. One where creative people will be able to read and work with ideas, with texts in a much more interesting and productive way.

The new 12.5" Lenovo Thinkpad X280 (2018) is thinner at 1.17cm thickness and lighter at 1.13kg with now an integrated non-removable battery. With two Type-C Thunderbolt 3 ports, two USB Type-A ports, HDMI, up to 16GB RAM, up to 1TB SSD, FHD or 1366x768 matte display with a matte touch on-cell option, compatible with Lenovo's new 2018 side docking standard, with a native Ethernet dongle, it also has a physical sliding cover to cover the webcam.

World leader in 4K projectors, Optoma presents their lower cost UHD50 to make 4K Projection more accessible to the mass market. This one features 2x HDMI 2.0 ports, HDR10, 50% vertical lens shift, 1.3 zoom. 2400lumen while the UHD60 is 3000lumen, RGBRGB color wheel, 2 inches smaller, 2 pounds lighter. For $200 more, they are also shipping the UHD51A with the same features as the UHD50 but it also comes with Amazon Alexa support, an Ethernet port, it runs Optoma's implementation of Android (not for installing apps, possibly for Google Assistant support also), USB Host port.

Lenovo releases their Tablet convertible running a full Windows 10 on the 64bit ARMv8 Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with built-in LTE. Lenovo digital pen with 1024 levels of sensitivity with Windows Ink. 15.6mm thickness, 1.33kg weight, up to 20 hours of local video playback battery life. Comes with a 12.3" WUXGA+ touchscreen to be priced starting at $799.

HP Envy x2 is a detachable convertible Tablet PC running a full Windows 10 on the 64bit ARMv8 Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with built-in always connected LTE and up to 22 hours of battery life. 90min 0% to 90% fast charging. Up to 1,000 hrs of connected stand-by time. Comes with the HP digital pen with Windows Ink for note taking and scribbling.

The HP Spectre x360 15 (2018 version) comes with the first hybrid Intel/AMD processor with an 8th Generation Intel Kaby Lake-G CPU with an AMD RX Vega M GPU on the same package. It comes with a 15.6" 4K Gorilla Glass 4 touch screen with support for HP's Tilt Pen, a 360-degree hinge, Bang & Olufsen audio, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD and also the option to have the NVIDIA GeForce MX150 GPU instead of the AMD one.

Asus wins my prize of most important "best of CES 2018" device. This is the most powerful ARM Powered laptop yet. Finally, after years of work by thousands of Microsoft and Qualcomm engineers, true full Windows 10 on ARM is just about to be ready to be launched onto the worldwide market. Powered by the 10nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, with over 20 hours of battery life, while it comes on Windows 10 S by default it can quickly be "upgraded" to full Windows 10 Professional for ARM that gives support for the emulation of every x86 (32bit emulation supported only for now, 64bit x86 apps will be emulated once Microsoft updates the Windows software further) Windows 10 .exe application, hopefully we can run advanced video editing apps such as Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, Pinnacle Studio, advanced music creation applications such as Ableton Live, Propellerhead Studio, advanced photo editing software such as Gimp and Adobe Photoshop. This Asus NovaGo comes with two full sized USB3 Host ports (sadly, no full sized SD card slot), a full sized HDMI output port, fingerprint reader in the corner of the mousepad and a full sized keyboard with a bright glossy 13.3" 1080p display. At the Qualcomm CES 2018 booth, they are also showing the two other devices (though both Tablet based 2-in-1 devices with flimsy case/stands) that are being released running Windows 10 on Snapdragon 835 which are the HP Envy x2 and the Lenovo Miix 630. I was hoping that somehow this would be the time Lenovo would unveil an ARM Powered Thinkpad style laptop, but hopefully Lenovo will consider to do that soon enough! In my opinion, Lenovo should do a Thinkpad X1 Carbon and Thinkpad x280 style ARM Snapdragon 835 laptop, that would be great, if possible sold at 50 percent cheaper than the Intel version of each. Also if HP would make an ARM Powered version of their HP Spectre x360, that would also be awesome. Of course it would be really great if they would sell this with an unlockable bootloader (they can manage it "securely" through an approval kind of thing if they'd like) and that users could install among many flavors of Linux on it if they'd prefer (Qualcomm should support the community to still keep full GPU acceleration and full LTE support within any Linux). The Asus NovaGo is the only real Laptop form factor yet running this new very important full Windows 10 on ARM platform.